Between the Local and the Global African Musicians in Israel

Studies in World Christianity, 2006

'I'm singing my way up' 103 'I'm singing my way up' 105 'I'm singing my way up' 123

The ‘return’ of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last three decades provides an alternative case. In this presentation I focus on the prominent role of music as ethno-racial information for Ethiopian Israelis as they engage with the process of homeing and integrating in Israel. I explore their experience as black Jews through the musical tastes of young Ethiopian Israelis. For these youths, far from leaving their Ethiopianness behind, music is the fodder for actively re-inventing it. I explore how they claim their place as Jews in Israel through participation in the musical communities of Ethiopian and African diasporas. Key words: race, Israel, music, Ethiopian

This paper enquires into the practice of music among people who live outside their country of origin; with a focus on the African people who find themselves living in Europe by virtue of re-settlement or any other justified cause of immigration. The aim of this research is to offer the community musician an insight into, and a good understanding of the music making activities carried out by the African diaspora in a specific geographical locus – Europe.

2019

A Jewish cultural life in South Africa is cast by secondary literatures as being English in form and Jewish in spirit. This established understanding of a South African Jewish identity is informed by cultural analyses that focus on tensions arising from being Jewish citizens of South Africa. The present thesis draws on socio-musical sources not yet introduced to general historiographies to interrogate this particular construction of Jewish identity. These sources refer to music-related items that appear in the South African Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Record newspaper publications of 1930-1948. The purpose of subjecting music reportage in local Jewish newspapers to a rigorous content analysis, is to open understandings of Jewish culture in South Africa from wider, cosmopolitan perspectives and to locate the function that music might have had in cultural processes of identity formation. Jews exercised South African musical citizenship through supporting the forming of musical institutions, as well as through pedagogy, the performing arts and composition, representations of which align with English cultural forms in the music reportage. While also concerned with securing the Jewish position in South Africa, Zionism developed a vision of and for Palestine by translating the act of making aliyah (immigrating to Palestine) into a symbolic, musical practice. The makings of the community’s internal Jewish identity forged around tensions between Eastern European and Western European (most notably German) Jewish immigrants. Musical representations of Eastern Europe, which emanated from Russia, America and South Africa, generated a volume of content that reflected a Jewish preoccupation with Russian Jews as both ignobly backward and commendably Jewish. German Jews fell out of favour with the South African Jewish community because of their proclivity to assimilate, which could explain why they received little musical attention in these newspapers. However, engagement with contemporary events in Europe, and strong depictions of German culture in the primary source material, emanated from the United States. American musical representations reveal the degree to which the internal tensions of European Jewry were racial. The musical geographies of England, Palestine, Russia, Germany and America in a South African Jewish imaginary reveal a cosmopolitanism of Jewish whiteness and the musical vision it harboured for Palestine as a Jewish country of the West.

Journal for North African Studies, 2021

This article presents the conclusions drawn from field work done in Morocco between 2007–2019 of the Judeo-Spanish repertoires of Northern Morocco and their internal societal functions. My findings conclude that their communal use is strictly inner facing and specific to their life in Morocco and not a representation of a long nostalgia for life in pre-Expulsion Spain, contrary to the prevailing focus in previous studies on this repertoire. Moroccan Jews have repurposed this material drawn from the cultures of contact to act as sonic protection against assimilation to the majority culture, through a complex system of encoded messages woven through the song texts, their contexts and moments of performance culminating in a prewedding ritual heavy with songs which reifies the bride as sacred vector for communal continuity through her sexual purity and fertility. Their use of music for constructing boundaries exemplifies sociological theories on boundaries and community identity which demonstrate a complex weaving and nesting of multiplicity of identities within their sung repertoires.

In this chapter, through dialogue between co-authors Alsarah and Anita Fabos, we attempt to capture and explore the musical and personal identity of singer/songwriter/bandleader Alsarah—at a particular point in time. The partial transcript and analysis presented here demonstrates the opportunities but also real dilemmas inherent in navigating identity and producing knowledge as a person from, but not in, or in some ways, of Sudan.

2021

Keynote address to first meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Global History of Music, Sichuan Conservatory of Music, People’s Republic of China, May 12, 2021

A musical scene emerged in Israel in the 1990s, around unprecedented interaction between Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze musicians in Israel and the West Bank. 2

This research paper explores how community music practice has been represented in most African countries, especially in the high populous nations in Africa, from beyond the nineteenth century era of music practice to a period of modern and western influence on the African music practice, this discuses instances where technology has brought about a revolution in the music industry and sites out basically how modern technology has marred the indigenous African community music practice. What is the hope for the future African music practice? How important is prototypical music practice to a culture? Where do we draw the line between the quest for social modern practice in a community and maintaining the authenticity of its traditional music sacrament?

Christian music in contemporary Africa: a re-examination of its essentials Christian music all over Africa (be it liturgical church music or gospel), in contemporary times has become so popular and well grown howbeit in divergent dimensions. As a result, there have been questions, debates and confusions both by insiders and outsiders of the Christian faith on what exactly constitutes Christian music. There then arises the need to theorise the fundamentals of Christian music, exhuming the Biblical, musical and socio-cultural basis for its performance practices. This article examines various principles that should guide contem-porary Christian musicianship, especially as contained in the Scriptures; arguing that the practice of Christian music cannot be divorced from Bible even when the principles of musical sound organisation and the socio-cultural needs of the society have to be observed. The tension created by the superim-position of the three is also resolved. This article is ther...